Hybrid multicast patching approach for video services

With the advancement of broadband networking technology, many clients are enabled to enjoy various video on demand (VoD) services. To provide VoD services to a number of clients, the network needs to consider various factors together; they are each viewerpsilas waiting time, buffer requirement at the client, channel management for video delivery, and complexity for video segmentation. Among the currently available VoD approaches, the polyharmonic broadcasting approach and the staircase multicasting approach show the best performance in terms of viewerpsilas waiting time and buffer requirement, respectively. However, these approaches need to divide a video into too many segments, and require many channels at a time. To overcome these limitations, we propose polyharmonic-staircase-staggered (PSS) multicasting approach which combines the Polyharmonic scheme with the staircase scheme. It is simple and bandwidth efficient. The numerical results demonstrate that each viewerpsilas waiting time in our approach is comparable to that in the polyharmonic approach, at the cost of a slight increase in bandwidth requirement, and its buffer requirement is about 60% less than that in the staircase approach by simply adjusting the front part of video segmentation. More importantly, our approach shows the best performance in number of channels to be managed and used simultaneously, which is a critical factor in real deployment.